Gods and Beasts

Gods and Beasts It s the week before Christmas when a lone robber bursts into a busy Glasgow post office carrying an AK An elderly man suddenly hands his young grandson to a stranger and wordlessly helps the gunma

Title: Gods and Beasts

Author: Denise Mina

ISBN: 9780316188524

Page: 129

Format: Hardcover

It s the week before Christmas when a lone robber bursts into a busy Glasgow post office carrying an AK 47 An elderly man suddenly hands his young grandson to a stranger and wordlessly helps the gunman fill bags with cash, then carries them to the door He opens the door and bows his head the robber fires off the AK 47, tearing the grandfather in two.DS Alex Morrow arrivIt s the week before Christmas when a lone robber bursts into a busy Glasgow post office carrying an AK 47 An elderly man suddenly hands his young grandson to a stranger and wordlessly helps the gunman fill bags with cash, then carries them to the door He opens the door and bows his head the robber fires off the AK 47, tearing the grandfather in two.DS Alex Morrow arrives on the scene and finds that the alarm system had been disabled before the robbery Yet upon investigation, none of the employees can be linked to the gunman And the grandfather a life long campaigner for social justice is above reproach As Morrow searches for the killer, she discovers a hidden, sinister political network Soon it is chillingly clear no corner of the city is safe, and her involvement will go deeper than she could ever have imagined.

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About "Denise Mina"

Denise Mina

Denise Mina was born in Glasgow in 1966 Because of her father s job as an Engineer, the family followed the north sea oil boom of the seventies around EuropeShe left school at sixteen and did a number of poorly paid jobs, including working in a meat factory, as a bar maid, kitchen porter and cook.Eventually she settled in auxiliary nursing for geriatric and terminal care patients.At twenty one she passed exams, got into study Law at Glasgow University and went on to research a PhD thesis at Strathclyde University on the ascription of mental illness to female offenders, teaching criminology and criminal law in the mean time.Misusing her grant she stayed at home and wrote a novel, Garnethill when she was supposed to be studying instead.

663 Comments

I've read Denise Mina before. The End of Wasp Season was really good; Gods and Beasts got great reviews. I was excited--then quickly disappointed; but mostly confused. This mystery series stars female cop, Alex Morrow, a married mom of young twins. Ostensibly, the plot is the murder of a grandfather in a post office--it appears that Grandpa, who hastily shoves his young grandson into the arms of the guy behind him--knew and cooperated with his killer. Okay, I'll bite. Onlywhat I bit into had not [...]

Of all of Denise Mina's books I've read to date, this was my least favorite. The characters didn't seem nearly as engaging, gritty and real as her characters usually do. All in all I had a hard time caring what happened to any of them. I was tickled to see Paddy Meehan appear, but sorely disappointed when she just drifted through on the periphery of the story. I miss everyone in the Garnet Hill and Paddy Meehan series!

Categorizing Denise Mina's "Gods and Beasts" as a mystery novel is a bit (may I say "wee"?) misleading. The book is much more than that. Yes, there is a police procedural thread in the plot, and the initial scene of a shooting in a Glasgow post office provides a framework for the novel. Yet Ms. Mina de-emphasizes the mystery aspect, and instead delivers a powerful study of human weakness and corruption. I found "Gods and Beasts" a little uneven. About a third into the book I was ready to proclai [...]

Reading Denise Mina is always such a pleasure. Her books are multilayered with more than one story line. This one is no exception. This is actually the first DI Morrow I've read. There were two previous ones: Still Midnight & The End of the Wasp Season. In this one, DI Alex Morrow is back from maternity leave after giving birth to twin boys. She and her husband are juggling their care, and she's not getting much sleep as a result. There are three stories that come together at the end: a robb [...]

Gods and Beasts is Denise Mina at her very best! From the introduction, with the mystery of the post office robbery with the strange behavior of the grandfather and the overall strange young American, to the chilling resolution, this is a book that is very hard to put down. Mina's characters are very real, with good sides and human flaws (and some much worse of course) and I do not think she has ever come up with one that I haven't felt something for or about! DS Alex Morrow is getting more and [...]

I just love Denise Mina - She's far more well-known in her home country of Scotland (and of course, England.) Mina is a blazing good thriller writer. Just drenched with local Glasgow "color" - and the smell of porter and Irn-Bru.If you've not encountered Mina before, her trilogies are the best of her works, in my opinion - but that could just be that I liked the characters so very much.This particular book concerns a lot of the "underground" in Glasgow's crime war. Glasgow is, and has been for m [...]

I have loved all Mina's previous books but was a little disappointed in this one. Some of the characters are carry-overs but I couldn't get engaged with them and the rather thin plot. I'll give her one more chance with her next one; I've got too much to read to keep on with authors who don't keep me fascinated.

I discovered Denise Mina through her run on Hellblazer, which I enjoyed immensely. However, despite my fondness for both crime fiction and all things Scottish, I never got around to reading one of her novels until I received Gods and Beasts through the first reads program.This is a damned fine novel. I was a little concerned about it being the third in a series, but Mina manages to acknowledge previous events and foreshadow future events in a manner that lends verisimilitude to the story at hand [...]

Mina's mysteries are always more about people, what motivates them to commit crimes, what their fears and vulnerabilities are, what their strengths are, just how they fit into the big picture of the underside of Glasgow. And then there are the cops, the good ones and the not so good ones. Alex Morrow, who has recently given birth to twins, is one of the good ones and she cares deeply about righting the huge injustices she comes across in her job. Unfortunate for her, she is a half sister to a no [...]

Denise Mina can certainly write: she conveys character with just a few traits of the pen and speech patterns. It's a story with an undercurrent of despair - the corruption of politicians and ongoing criminality of Glasgow - but there are some characters that you feel hopeful about, some that you hope will be able to create a new life for themselves.

A well written, once one gets all the different threads sorted, thriller with a Glaswegian side order of politics and corruption. A model citizen out with his grandson walks up to a post office robber and helps in the course of a robbery. The why of this is most satisfactorily resolved.

I'll say from the outset that I think Denise Mina is the finest of the "tartan noire" writers, and that's still the case with Gods and Beasts. It's well-written, interesting, one I looked forward to each evening, all that. Probably a four-star book, really, but there's something holding me back.Part of what I find lacking is the one thing I really enjoy about reading series novelists, that of returning to a familiar character. Alex Morrow, however, is perhaps the least defined of Mina's recurrin [...]

this third in denise mina's Alex Morrow series opens with one of mina's most intensely dark scenes, filled with her trademark grittily evocative writing she sets the scene and demands the reader follow her into it with perfect word choices: "martin pavel heard it all as if through a pillow," "the small boy koala-clamped to his chest" and "ying to steal him back from a world where your grandfather could do something like that." how could you not have to read on after that?as usual, mina creates a [...]

It is the week before Christmas and all is not well…in Glasgow. Here, a robber comes charging into a post office carrying an AK-47 rifle and wants all the cash on hand. A terrified young boy is handed over to a customer by his grandfather, as the old man very calmly helps the robber gather up the money. The grandfather even helps the robber carry the cash to the door, opens the door and bows to the thief. Whereupon the robber fires the AK-47 into the body of the old man, killing him instantly. [...]

Just when I thought my faith in Mina was fully restored following The End of the Wasp Season, she leaves me struggling with the next promising, but highly convoluted story in her Alex Morrow-series. After a strong start, I realised I was slowly growing frustrated because I was getting the many secondary characters mixed up. (Thankfully Paddy Meehan makes a cameo appearance - at least there's no doubt about her role in the story.) There is an array of sub-plots and backstories that kind of go now [...]

Upfront: I am a total fangirl of Denise Mina, especially her early trilogy. Cannot recommend that highly enough. Her Glasgow newspaper reporter Paddy feels like an old profane friend. Her current Alex Morrow cop creation, of which "God and Beasts" is numero three-o, not so much. Which is to say, I still grab a new Mina off the library shelf, tear off home with it and read it in long stretches of "don't bother me." Morrow, as several reviewers here put it more elegantly, is a phantom in these pag [...]

I will NOT be reading other books by this author. Her only point seems to be that the world is going to hell in a hand basket and people trying to do good are spitting on a fire. Well, thank you very much, I see enough of that every day, I don't need a fictional depiction of the worst of it. No, I'm not looking solely for happy endings, but I do look for what I read to enlighten me or lift me out of the crap, not throw me in the middle of the worst of it because of the author's literary pretensi [...]

Second read, this a vanilla slice of a novel - multiple, pocketed layers, many of them having corners filled with at-first-unseen dirt, all concealed by the deliciousness of Mina's ability to interleave it with such apt and telling jammy notes describing character and place. Denise Mina is a master of setting up expectations about characters and then demolishing them, subtly and to some extent insidiously. This is no exception, might even be the most mind-bending of the lot because I find myself [...]

I continue to love this series. In this one, police corruption is involved, and like that everyone on the staff is susceptible--the author didn't introduce new characters to be corrupted, leaving the established characters unscathed. She does a great job with the realities of working relationships between cops; you may respect them, but you don't necessarily like them (as is true of most of us and our co-workers!). The plotting and development were spot on and I look forward to my next book in t [...]

Working my way through the Alex Morrow books and so far this one probably is my least favorite. There are a few too many story lines woven together this time (4? 5?) and while normally I don't mind finding out how they're connected at the end, for much of the book it just feels like not much is happening. Especially with the politician story line. Still, Mina's writing remains solid and her characters are impeccable.

I have often considered ending my reading relationship with Denise Mina, especially after the Alex Morrow series. I have now made it final. While I acknowledge that Mina can write, It is clear, at least to me, that what she cannot do is create a cogent plot. In Gods and Beasts she definitely loses her way. It is a muddled, overblown plot that accomplishes little and satisfies even less.

Was really invested in the characters and storyline until the end. I was hoping there would be more of a connection between the separate people, more of a payoff. A good read, but nothing to rave about I guess.

I think Mina is the best writer of all the Scots mystery authors and I love anything she does but this one is slightly less engrossing than the prior Alex Morrow (The End of Wasp Season). That said, still highly recommended but make sure you read the first two in the series first.

This book was a waste of time. Too many characters and subplots that don't really connect, or at least not very well. I was somewhat patiently waiting for everything to lead somewhere when the book ended.

Mina continues her Alex Morrow series with her guaranteed flair for writing superior thrillers. Just when you think you have a character or situation understood, she throws a curve and you are once again thinking while enjoying her story. She is a master of her craft.

The most interesting thing about this author is her characters. They are all so unique and compelling, they would make for a great fiction novel even without the mystery. every time I finish one I am sad that it is over.

72% into this one and I'm struggling to finish. Scanning some other reviews on here, I'm clearly not the only one finding these multiple storylines unconvincing. Apparently they all tie together at the end, but to be honest I'm not sure if I care that much. I can't connect with any of these characters. Apparently having young twins which you are breastfeeding is incredibly easy, so easy in fact that you can also be a DI leading a major murder inquiry. I'll never give any credence to motherhood b [...]

Denise Mina has a powerful imagination, and her prose is flawless. This is a book full of very bad people. Many of them you'd really rather like, but they let you down in spectacular ways. _Gods and Beasts_ is a meticulously constructed police procedural that's also about all the ways people who love each other disappoint one another. There's a Corbyn-like figure in here—a political has-been, not one newly firing up the party—who has some seriously nasty scandals to try and keep covered up, [...]